Quarantine (2008)

Directed by John Erick Dowdle [Other horror films: The Poughkeepsie Tapes (2007), Devil (2010), As Above, So Below (2014)]

A remake of the Spanish movie [Rec], Quarantine is a movie I’ve seen before. I likely thought it was okay, but that’s really all it is. I can’t say I actually liked the original more – it’s been a while since I’ve seen [Rec] – but I can say that Quarantine strikes me as competent, and little more.

Found footage is always an interesting style. It works for this movie – things move at a quick pace, but on the flip-side, due to the shaky camera, it’s pretty difficult to see some of the horrors that go on. Well, mostly – there was a young girl who was sick, and possibly with the same infection others have, but she didn’t actually display any violent tendencies until the very moment that the camera-man focused on her, because that didn’t feel forced at all.

Of course, the story is decent. Shows the evil of the government decently enough. Well, technically, you could make a case that the government has every right to enforce a quarantine on the building, but they gave the people trapped absolutely zero explanation, and went on television claiming the building had been evacuated, so no one can seriously blame the people inside the building for fighting to find a way out. The government’s reaction was wrong, just as the government’s reaction was wrong in The Stand (and it’s worse in that case, as the whole thing was the government’s fault to begin with).

I can’t say I remember a lot about [Rec], but I do remember the ending seeming to bring some type of potential religious origin into it, which is entirely avoided here. Theoretically, that’s something that I’d agree with, but I’d need to see [Rec] again before I can actually say what origin of the disease I liked more. This one doesn’t go deep into it, save a room some characters look through at the end, but it all seemed plausible, which is more than what I can say for religious origins.

Only three performances really matter, being Jennifer Carpenter, Steve Harris, and Jay Hernandez. Hernandez, of course, is a familiar face, having been the star of Hostel, and though he’s not the most important character here, he’s nice to see. Steve Harris (The First Purge) played the camera-man, so we rarely saw him, but his voice was occasionally soothing, and while Jennifer Carpenter (The Exorcism of Emily Rose) was a bit hysterical at times, who in her situation wouldn’t be?

Honestly, I don’t know if there’s a lot more to say about this one. It’s just an okay found footage movie with very little in it that stands out. That finale, while tense, wasn’t enough to make up for the somewhat annoying shaky camera we had to deal with for the previous hour, and while Quarantine’s not a bad movie, I’d struggle to say it’s actually good, or even all that preferable to the original movie.

7/10